I'll Do Anything

Am I sometimes obstinate? Yes. A lot. There are things I will not do. I will not put lipstick on a lion. I will not deny the redness of Tuesday. I resist. Am I tempted? Yes. I crumble before the spectacle of the clouds, any clouds, any formation, any manifestation of mist, trails of vapor in the sky, mountains of fluffy humidity, hoards of columnar aerosols, droplets and crystals. They make me giddy. I feel an ancient darkness flying through my furniture. It stirs me. I'll do anything. I will wear the uniform of death, which is ice. I will rinse my faith in the young. I will sew the light of thought with the thread of contemplation and crown my head with proverbs.

This morning, as I ate a banana, I thought about the quiet life of the refrigerator.

I have no theories of life. Logic suggests that at one point there was an intersection of the organic and the inorganic. A mixture of molecules became animated. Metal catalysts formed proteins and lipids and ribonucleic acid. This is one theory. Another suggests that acetylene and formaldehyde underwent a sequence of reactions that resulted in a chain of nucleotides. Fast forward 440 million years and here I sit writing this sentence, a chain of words seeking to find life and animation in the proteins and mind of anyone who reads them.

It would cost me $39 dollars, roughly, to resurrect the voice of my father. Twenty-four years ago my father and I went on a three-day road trip around eastern Washington, the gentle hills of the Palouse, pictographs of Horsethief Lake, windsurfers in the Columbia gorge. I taped our conversation on a RadioShack microcassette. I'd been reading Kerouac’s tape recorded conversations in Visions of Cody which made me think of the microcassette in my desk drawer, with the tape still in it. I rummaged around and found it. I opened the battery case. The batteries had corroded. I got them out and cleaned the compartment. I put two new AA batteries in. No go. The machinery inside had probably corroded as well. RadioShack has since gone bankrupt. I went online. There were a few available through Amazon. The cheapest was $39 dollars.

Some friends recommend a place on Aurora called GT Recording that transfers media. I give them a call. The man I talked to sounded a little gloomy, but yes, he could transfer the recording of the microcasettes to CDs. It will take a few days. I tell him that’s fine. I take the two microcassettes to GT Recording and a few weeks later the CDs are ready. This time the man sounds very cheerful. He seems to have enjoyed hearing about our road trip to the Palouse.

Roberta and I drove out to pick them up. We are buzzed into a small reception room. A pleasant young woman behind the desk goes to get the tapes and CDs for me. The CDs are encased in a transparent plastic CD case and titled "Palouse Trip"1 and 2. The technician himself appears and I notice that he is blind. He apologizes for the sound of the car in the CDs, he couldn’t remove that, and I tell him that's fine, the sound of the car lends itself to the atmosphere of being on a road trip. I can tell he enjoyed hearing the tapes. I pay for the CDs, which came to $99. We put it in the CD player of our car and begin listening to it. There it is, my father's voice, clear as the day we went on our road trip.

We decide to go to Home Depot to look for a new ceiling light for our kitchen as the younger, 46-year-old version of me (now 70, roughly my dad’s age when we went on the trip) announces Issaquah on the CD and my father points out Tiger Mountain, elevation 3,005 feet, and that the clouds are even with the summit, which indicates that the cloud base is at 3.0000 feet. He points out another mountain called Squak Mountain and tells me that he had a glider partner named Klaus who bought ten acres there and built a house. "He was one of those guys that wants everything just so," he says. "One day, his wife moved a picture by an inch, thinking oh, he won't notice. But as soon as he got home he shouted 'what's the meaning of this!' He noticed immediately that the picture had been moved. He's the kind of guy that counted the number of peanuts he kept on his bar in the basement. If you ate one, he would immediately replace it, so that it was always the same number of peanuts."

"I went to an air show in Tacoma once," my father continued. "I listened to a few lectures, then went outside for a smoke. There were two airline pilots outside, a man and a woman, who were also taking a smoke break. I started a conversation. They flew for United. Oh, I say, I used to have a glider partner named Klaus something-or-other who flew for United. Any chance you might know of him? 'Oh shit,' said the woman harshly. She stomped out her cigarette and walked off without saying another word."

We arrive at Home Depot just as I give my father a report about the state of the rest room at a truck diner. I was impressed with the state of cleanliness, which I hadn't been expecting. 

I get a strong, nostalgic feeling for that road trip. I love eastern Washington.  

When you cross the Cascade Range in Washington State you go from a mountainous terrain of thick Douglas fir and mists and dense underbrush to a more arid terrain of rock and Ponderosa pine. I always enjoy that.

Aging is a very similar process. I went from the more crowded years of my youth  -  a time of fertility and hectic socializing -  to the more reclusive years of my forties. I withdrew. I think a lot of people do. It’s exhausting to be around other people.

People get along because they’re strangers to one another. Civility is the best means available when we have to be around other people we don’t know, or people we know, or think we know, until one day we find out we don’t know them at all. We put on a good show. Smile when it’s appropriate to smile, frown when it’s appropriate to frown. Our true emotions and thoughts are prudently hidden from the world. This doesn’t mean that all our thoughts and emotions are negative or hostile. But the conceptions we make of ourselves are a very volatile compound. It only takes is a little rude jostling to make it all explode.

And look at me, commenting on all of humanity as if I were some sort of expert. I’m not. But I have been around the block a few times. I know what it’s like to explode. And regret exploding. Because when you explode there is fallout. Seismic billows and stern usherettes with flashlights. Let feelings incubate. Mature into fruit, flashcards and games. Don’t let them explode, transmit them from the backbone. Affirm them with emergency room saucepans.

Why should it bother anyone if their opinions are scorned by someone else? By a lot of people? I’m not a fan of solipsism, but when I’m certain about a thing, and someone argues against it, it’s hard not get a little hot under the collar. Take Galileo (and I’m not saying I’m Galileo) who saw what he saw and knew what he knew: the moons of Jupiter orbiting Jupiter, proving heliocentrism. That disturbed a lot of people. Galileo was not being egocentric. Galileo was being heliocentric. I like to think that I’m being heliocentric, at least most of the time.

Feelings are weird. These dancing lights around me are produced by fireflies. Why do they glow? Are they communicating, and if so, what are they saying?

My feelings tell me that the landscape is mostly fingers, and that language is violent when it distorts its own postulations. Sin is a growl. Innocence is a pulse. The parlor savors of coincidence.

How is the value of a feeling determined? I use a series of bathythermographs to measure the underwater acoustic speed of my feelings when they begin to surface and seek expression in words. I do this for two reasons: one, I like boxes, and two, I expect to sneeze at any given moment.

If you perform an act that will confirm and define it, the feeling will form a piano and climb into the sky. If you ignore a feeling, it will grow into a mountain and bake. If you consult a priest who is a member of the resistance, you will have already decided that your feeling is a plump apocalypse waiting to happen. Most feelings want you to do something. Most feelings want you to change. Or get a hammer and build something.

Let me show you some feelings. This one is blue and this one is a long lock of hair trembling in rapid vibrations. This feeling just spins around shooting sparks. And this feeling walks around in my head precipitating books.

Just let me say that writing about how you feel is totally slate. Any fine-grained rock will tell you that. But you must chip at the edge with a geologist’s hammer. Nothing will be revealed until you learn to mimic other birds and regard the water lilies with a twinkling congeniality. I have to go now and patrol the maples in their underclothes. If anything backfires I will develop a spice and hobble toward you with my confidence quietly concealed in a mulch of bark and peat. Together we will respond generously to the spirit within, even if it means denuding a perception of its bias and tongs.